Productivity using Cloud technology, online and mobile tools

Left navigation intranet is so last year!

I have always been a defender of using the “OOB” Out Of the Box tool of a product before it comes to adding some custom code to it. However, let’s be honest, for years SharePoint was not great at it when only using out-of-the-box features. I even gave a talk in the past where we discussed how to gain the love back from users.

In the SharePoint world, “Team site” was the default layout for any SharePoint Intranet for years, and still are. Left navigation being super boring, especially when more than 15 links and scrolling 2 meters down the page! So most companies ended to customise their site so much that the next version of SharePoint meant to do it all again.

But with the latest SharePoint modern sites and pages, it’s sleek, minimalist, clean and .. well, not clunky anymore! SharePoint owners are now super excited to use them as their intranet pages.

There is just one problem:

we haven’t been told how to use these as the “top level page” of an intranet. The first page that user will see when they click on the SharePoint homepage: https://mydomain.sharepoint.com.

Thanks to this blog article by Jimmy Hang and reading the comments, I have summarised how to do so. And I can confirm to have repeated the steps in 3 different tenants, therefore, no, Microsoft did not remove the ability to use these “workarounds.”

Delete Top Site

the top site collection of SharePoint already exists (as a boring team site), go to SharePoint admin and delete it (if empty ;-).

Recreate top site collection without selecting a template

Do not select any template, use the option “Custom / select template later”

Create a modern communication site anywhere

Create a new site from the new SharePoint Admin Center or from the “SharePoint” site list, if this option is not disabled for your tenant.

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Published by Francois Souyri

French native living in London, for over 10 years François built applications with the end-user in mind before UX term became mainstream. Crossway between a designer, developer and system architect, he prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code.
View all posts by Francois Souyri

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2 comments

For test and development tenants you can use it in production this is currently not supported.
With some luck, your default team site collection will be recreated. With some luck, you have to open a support ticket because some things won’t work anymore.
There are hidden features enabled during the root site collection creation that you removed.

Fully agree on that Stefan. Some “new features” even became deprecated after a few months of release, so playing with these is only valid for dev and test and only for a limited time – until it stops working.
Thank you for reminder occasional readers of this article: “reproducing on your own live environment is at your own risk” ;-)